[OSM-talk] Voting invited for the Map Features source proposal

[Nick Hill]

Hello Etienne

Being the sort of person of a democratic mindset, I like the idea of a 
democratic voting system for map features.

However, I do have some concerns about whether such a process would 
yield a consistent map feature set (that is assuming a consistent map 
feature set is what we want. Perhaps we should vote for that?).

Most of the key/value pairs which are being proposed provide a great 
deal of specificity. On the surface, that might seem good. However, 
we'll end up with dozens of possible key pair combinations for a public 
park. This makes searching and rendering unnecessarily difficult, and 
perhaps makes the selection of tags ambiguous.

If we were aiming for a consistent feature set, we could have a very 
small selection of top-layer descriptions for the aerial representation 
of the physical item. This would determine in the first instance how it 
should be rendered and make the rendering decision very simple. 
Additional tags can then be added to increase specificity. It would then 
be up to the person writing the rendering engine, or up to the user the 
degree of specificity they want rendered and up to the person labelling 
the area the level of detail to be added.

Another way of describing my proposal is the top layer description is 
very general, required for rendering, and implies a series of 
overridable attributes. These attributes can be overridden/set by a 
group of more specific descriptions, then these can be overridden by 
very specific attributes.

For areas, top layer keys could be land, building or water.
Land and building have around 20 values each for the type of land or 
building. Water includes stream, river, lake, sea, brook.

Therefore, for area rendering, just by looking for the top level key for 
the area, we have a sensible basis for rendering.



Etienne wrote:
> Folks
> In an effort to try to get some of the proposed Map Features promoted to 
> full Map Features status I have devised a process.  The process is 
> described at http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Proposed_features.  
> A feature can be put to the vote for a two week period.  Voting should 
> take place on the proposed feature's page in the usual wiki style 
> support/against form.